Projects

Much of our work is conceiving, planning and implementing research and teaching projects with humanities faculty members. We welcome inquiries at any time (see contact us or our staff page for contact details). If you have an idea for a research or teaching project that might include writing software (e.g. database, website, audio/video, program) or creating/preparing data, see our material on how to get HCMC to participate in your proposed project.

We handle requests ranging from "can you fix this web page" to "can you create a research and publication platform for this vast collection of material in collaboration with these other institutions". If your question is outside our scope, we'll help you get in touch with someone who can help you.

Featured Projects

Literary map of early modern London

The Map of Early Modern London is a hyperlinked atlas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century London based on the "Agas" woodcut map of the 1560s. Over 200 sites and streets are linked to pages that provide a full historical and archaeological survey, quotations from John Stow's Survey of London, and a bibliography of literary references. Over 200 additional sites and streets are identified. For example, you can click on a street and find all the literary references in our database to that street. This site began as a pedagogical tool in 1999. It is in the process of becoming a scholarly tool with fully refereed articles. Technologies used include PHP, eXist, XQuery.

Myths on maps

The Myths on maps project focuses on deploying an interactive map of Europe with overlays for Greek and Roman myths, history, people and events.

Landscapes of Injustice

The Landscapes of Injustice project seeks to combine information from various sources (community records, land titles, directories, personal testimonials, government records, maps etc.) to give a multi-faceted account of the dispossession of Japanese-Canadian owned property owned by the government's Custodian of Enemy Property office in the 1940's. The project will produce research resources, narrative and instructional websites and a travelling museum installation drawing on all the material gathered by the project.

UVic Songhees Conference

This February 2017 conference hosted by the Songhees Nation and the University of Victoria focuses on relations between First Nations and James Douglas to explore indigenous and colonial concepts of land, law and territory.

Colonial despatches

The Colonial Despatches digital archive contains the original correspondence between the British Colonial Office and the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. This project aims to digitize and publish online a complete archive of the correspondence covering the period from 1846 leading to the founding of Vancouver Island in 1849, the founding of British Columbia in 1858, the annexation of Vancouver Island by British Columbia in 1866, and up to the incorporation of B.C. into the Canadian Federation in 1871. The 1858 documents (over 600) are already online, and work is continuing on the other years.

All the material on Colonial Despatches site originates in the work of Dr. James Hendrickson and his team of collaborators at the University of Victoria, which resulted in the publication of 28 print volumes of correspondence several years ago. Those original transcriptions have been converted into TEI P5 XML, and presented in the form of highly interactive and searchable website. The site was given a formal launch on November 3, 2008, at the Maritime Museum in downtown Victoria, and has since attracted coverage in the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Sun, the Saanich News, the Victoria Times Colonist, and A-Channel TV News.

The Franklin expedition mysteries

The Franklin mystery site is the thirteenth in the Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian Mystery series. It encourages students to explore the disappearance of the two ships (and modern discovery of one of them), as well as Inuit and British cultural values and the role of scientific exploration in the 19th century by looking at reproductions of primary documents.